Deborah Ager's Blog, page 17

Day 28: Steven Allen May Discloses His Five Favorite Poetry Books

Shh…we're part of 30 (maybe 35) poets sharing their five favorite poetry books during National Poetry Month, which is almost over! Although the month comes to a close, the recommendations live forever on the 32 Poems blog. Don't believe me? This post about how the five favorite poetry books idea came to be tells you what you need to know—and provides links to other book recommendations.

Now, Steven Allen May shares his suggestions:

EECCHHOOEESS by n. h. pritchard. New York University Press, 1971.

Norman H. Pritchard is not a household name although he ought to be recognized as an early American Concrete poet. The fact that he was an Afro-American Concrete poet seems to have confused a number of people; reviewers, the buying public, etc. However it should be noted that his two full collections were published by New York University Press and Doubleday. His work was extremely ahead of his time, highly visual, and nearly impossible to read. That's the challenge. That's the reward.

Metropolis 1-15 by Robert Fitterman. Sun & Moon Press, 2000.

Fitterman, working in a parallel universe as Rachel Blau DuPlessis with her Drafts series, has re-imagined the long poem form. His Metropolis series aims to be as large as the city that crafted it (New York). Here each section is a different form, a different tone, a different voice. It's an incredible beginning!

Silent Type by Barbara DeCesare. Paper Kite Press, 2007. Barbara DeCesare is a poet, any book of hers is more than worth reading but HEARING her read her work is that much better. Once you hear her, the voice snakes off the page and into your ears as though she is whispering her poems just to you. The book is an experience. Catching her live is an experience, listening to her CD is an experience. How often can that be said about a POET?

That This by Susan Howe. New Directions, 2010. The 2011 winner of Yale University's Bollinger Prize in American Poetry. I have an appreciation of Ms. Howe's work going back several years now and I found this book heartfelt and very moving. At the same time, I was less engaged in the middle third of the book as it seemed I have seen this act before in earlier books of hers: shredded text. The final section, the title piece, is remarkable, making the experience more than worthwhile.

jambandbootleg by Paul Siegell. A-head Publishing, 2009. Paul Siegell is a young gun poet in Philadelphia who has successfully fused his love of live music performance by, say, Phish, for example, with highly visual components. This is his initial book and it absolutely has launched him. Pay attention to this one!

BIO: stevenallenmay is a poet, publisher, and blogger living in Northern VA. He co-founded Plan B Press in 1999. Last year Plan B Press published the highly regarded Full Moon on K Street: poems about Washington D.C. edited by Kim Roberts. When not running the Press, steven chases around his two small children.

Day 27: Juliana Gray on Five Favorite Poetry Books

We at 32 Poems have you've enjoyed the previous 26 days of poetry book recommendations from a wide range of poets. We continue this effort today with selections from Juliana Gray.

1. Meadowlands, Louise Gluck. Does Louise Gluck really need more press? Does she need me to promote her? No and no. Nevertheless, I adore this book. It's one of the most spare, most moving depictions of heartbreak that I've ever read.

2. Ecstatic in the Poison, Andrew Hudgins. Hudgins creates some truly scary material (Vikings, Romans, angels, demons, growing up in Alabama), and does not flinch.

3. Becoming the Villainess, Jeannine Hall Gailey. Gailey brushes the dust off the ol' dramatic monologue and lets characters like Wonder Woman, Lara Croft, and a certain vampire slayer have at it. Pop culture meets myth, and they get along famously.

4. Buffalo Dance: The Journey of York, by Frank X Walker. I'm a sucker for personas and historical poems. These lyrics are spoken by York, the slave who accompanied Lewis and Clark on their explorations, and they're absolutely gorgeous in their voice and spare, powerful imagery.

5. After the Revival, Carrie Jerrell. I love poems about music, perhaps because I've never been able to successfully write one myself, and Jerrell pulls it off masterfully. Even the poems that aren't about music have a drawl and rhythm that should be spun on an old jukebox.

BIO: Juliana Gray is the author of Roleplay (forthcoming from Dream Horse Press) and The Man Under My Skin. She teaches at Alfred University in western New York and at the Sewanee Young Writers' Conference.

Day 27: Carrie Jerrell on Five Favorite Poetry Books

Here are five first poetry books that Carrie Jerrell likes a lot:

1. Evie Shockley's a half-red sea

2. Rebecca Black's Cottonlandia

3. David Roderick's Blue Colonial

4. Josh Bell's No Planets Strike

5. Kevin McFadden's Hardscrabble

BIO: Carrie Jerrell's collection After the Revival won the 2008 Anthony Hecht Poetry Prize. She is an assistant professor of English and associate director of the low-residency MFA program at Murray State University in Murray, Kentucky.

Recipes for Poets

Time management is one of the most important (yet seldom discussed) aspects of being a poet or any kind of artist. Are your eyes glazing over because I wrote "time management"? Stick with with me a for a moment, please.

Since most poets have other work that takes their attention away from art, it's important to have time management skills. One of the many ways I save time is by cooking healthy meals that do not take long to prepare.

For that reason, I invite you to join me in posting your favorite 20-minute (or so) recipe on May 20, 2011. Post your recipe to your blog or website. I will share all of the links in a big post here on the 32 Poems blog. To participate, please do the following by May 15, 2011 (thanks to Kelli Agodon for inspiration on the guidelines):

Recipes for Poets Guidelines

Create a blog post that lets people know you will participate. If you can, refer them to this post.
Leave me a comment on this post that includes your blog URL and name if you would like to participate.
On May 20th, post a recipe that takes 20-30 min (or less) to prepare on your blog or website.
It's easiest if you place the recipe into the blog post you wrote above, so I'd already have the link for it. If you don't want to do that, you can just send me the new link.
I will include a master list of all of the participating blogs right here on the 32 Poems blog.

Can I count on you? Are you in?

Confession Tuesday

Happy Confession Tuesday! Share a bit about YOU today.

I confess I'm happy that Randall Weiss interviewed Collin Kelley because he met Collin via the Twitter Poet Party. I confess that I hoped these kinds of connections would be made when I started Poet Party. (Follow hashtag #poetparty on Twitter at 9 pm ET on Sundays)

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I confess to writing in form and to wondering why I spent so many years only writing free verse.

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I confess to loving Confession Tuesday. I look forward to blog posts like this and this.

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When I see Spinal Tap on the same sign as Robert Hass (see photo), I confess that I smile. Has Robert Hass watched Spinal Tap?

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I am surprised that more people have not dropped their name into the hat to get a free poetry book.

Day 26: Mary Biddinger on 5 recent poetry books that will curl your toes and tickle your fancy

1. Makeshift Instructions for Vigilant Girls by Erika Meitner. One of the most beautifully designed books of the year, this collection is a brilliant foray into the nature of transgression and desire. These poems break the rules while delivering advice, and embody a number of perspectives and interpretations of "vigilance."

2. Faulkner's Rosary by Sarah Vap. Reading this book is a completely transformational experience. You'll never think of the body the same way again. This book is a must-read for anyone who aspires to convey personal experience in a way that rivets readers of all backgrounds. Vap's use of the line is unparalleled in contemporary poetry, in my opinion.

3. The Luckless Age by Steve Kistulentz. Spending a Friday evening at home with this collection will make you feel as if you've had the wildest night of your life. These poems are riotous and poignant, ecstatic and wise. An excellent book for course adoption—my students were floored by these poems (in a very good way).

4. Say So by Dora Malech. This collection reminds us that poetry is made of music, and these poems make music of things both ordinary and extraordinary. I especially admire the way Malech's poems create their own sense of form and order, and then completely ransack that sense of form and order, right before our eyes.

5. American Busboy by Matthew Guenette. I am cheating here because this book is forthcoming (but available for pre-order) and because my press is publishing it, but I can't write a list of five without including American Busboy. This is an epic collection just begging to be made into a rock opera—one with heroic busboys, surly customers, tyrannical management, and an enduring commentary on the nature of sweat and struggle in contemporary America.

BIO: Mary Biddinger is the author of three poetry collections: Prairie Fever (Steel Toe Books, 2007), the chapbook Saint Monica (Black Lawrence Press, 2011), and O Holy Insurgency (Black Lawrence Press, 2012), and co-editor of one volume of criticism: The Monkey and the Wrench: Essays into Contemporary Poetics (U Akron Press, 2011). She teaches at The University of Akron, and edits Barn Owl Review and the Akron Series in Poetry. She is the director of the NEOMFA: Northeast Ohio Master of Fine Arts in creative writing program. Her website and her blog.

Day 25: Randall Mann's Five Favorite Poetry Books

Here are five relatively recent books of poems that I have turned to again and again over the last few years.

Geri Doran, Resin, LSU, 2005: A brief, vulnerable, heartbreaking book all "fierceness and moonlight," suffused with losses both personal ("My brightest star is a continent away") and historical ("Bones litter the steppes, / dog tags spilled onto spines, here and there / a makeshift ribcage trellis"). This is serious, blindingly intelligent poetry for adults.

Sidney Wade, Stroke, Persea, 2008: Wade is our shiny poet of desire and lightness, and of, what she calls in one poem, "The Weight of Light" ("In this moment, sowing its great and murderous / swindle overseas, the state / the state efficiently removes the available light from the air…"). For more, see an essay I wrote on Wade, "The Lightness of Sidney Wade."

Michael Hofmann, Selected Poems, FSG, 2008: Line by line, no poet in English writes more manically, maniacally, dazzlingly, about the human condition. Also, he's fiendishly witty. Also, best adverbs ever.

Louise Glück, A Village Life, FSG, 2009: A great book, maybe her best; it's a series of character sketches in an imagined village, and the poems of everyday beauty and failure unfold casually, sparingly, and cruelly. Every noun is perilous, like the fire in her poem "Sunset": "It's a small thing, controlled, / like a family run by a dictator."

Frederick Seidel, Poems 1959-2009, FSG, 2009: Bloated, risky, ridiculous, maddening, charming, unlike-anyone-else Frederick Seidel. On his Ducati. At Elaine's. Et cetera. Like the women in his poem "Fucking," I can't get enough.

Day 25: Andrew Kozma's Favorite Poetry Books

My Five Favorite Poetry Books by Andrew Kozma

Or, at least, the five poetry books that have influenced me and my writing and my reading of poetry with the understanding that this list is provisional and, since it is by nature only limited to five, is definitely not comprehensive.

1. Selected Poems, W. H. Auden

God, Auden is so weird. What I love about this collection, and Auden in general, is his conflation of the formally poetic with the strange, unnatural, and fantastic. His poems can be specific in image, inscrutably abstract, and still incredibly affecting.



2. 77 Dream Songs, John Berryman

Yes, the dream songs went on and on, a project Berryman was loathe to finish. In this first collection, though, I find distilled all the strangeness of syntax and all the concerns about knowledge (what we say we know vs. what we can actually know) that resonate through Berryman's works. These poems are proof that what makes sense isn't necessarily sensical.

3. Autobiography of Red, Anne Carson

I love all of Anne Carson's work, but Autobiography of Red is easiest to pinpoint as a favorite book because it's all one poem. If there's anyone who is best equipped to take classical stories and myths and make them anew, it's Carson. Here, she reimagines a minor myth involving Hercules into an epic coming-of-age story.

4. Radio Crackling, Radio Gone, Lisa Olstein

Radio Crackling, Radio Gone was the first contemporary book of poetry I read that I felt kinship to, in the sense that I thought, Yes, here are poems I might've could've would've written. Which is to say, the poems in this book work through associative logic. They tell stories through image accumulation. The poems are phrase collections where each is understandable on its own, but is only truly understood in the gaps between those phrases, the connections that are only implied. Also, this book contains the only poem I know consisting simply of bird names that makes me want to cry.

5. bk of (h)rs, Pattie McCarthy

Since I first read this book seven years ago, I've been thinking about it. Thinking about it, because I'm not really sure what to say. When I finished reading the book the first time, I knew that I liked it, liked it a lot, but found it difficult to recommend because I couldn't say what I liked about it. The poems individually are thickets of words and punctuation and distorted syntax. The voice in these poems desperately wants you to understand, and by the end of reading the book, you do — even if that understanding is most easily conveyed to others through convincing them to read the book. So why is this one of my favorite books? Because it embraces mystery with elegance and grace. Because it won't leave me alone.

BIO: Andrew Kozma is the author of City of Regret (Zone 3 Press, 2007) and has had poems recently published in Chariton Review, Yemassee, The Pinch, and Strange Horizons. You can find him online at .

Day 24: Ren Powell on Favorite Poetry Books

Learn more about how 32 Poems chose to celebrate National Poetry Month with recommendations of favorite poetry books!

Today's suggestions come to us from Ren Powell.

1. Christine Hamm's Saints & Cannibals. (Plainview Press, 2010) I keep thinking, "Wow. I know the speaker of these poems. I know this world."  These are family poems with their everyday objects: the salmon gills, sewing machines and "iron bitter spigots"; the everyday intimacy and pain. It's home and it hurts, but I will return to these poems often.

2. A contemporary classic: Natasha Trethewey's Bellocq's Ophelia (Graywolf Press, 2002). The collection is an epistolary novel in verse. The story is an imaginative construction of the psyche of one woman who appears in a portrait by the 20C photographer E.J.Belloq. I admire how Trethewey has imbued the "missing poems" with such importance: the poems that would have presented Constance's response to Ophelia's needful ones.

3. 70 Faces by Rachel Barenblat (Phoenicia Publishing, 2011) is a kind of extrapolation of the Moses books. Reading these poems took me back to the stories of my childhood. The watercolor illustrations from my Children's Bible and the disturbing narratives that kept me up nights. Part 6 of the Akedah Cycle/Vayera sent me right back to Genesis to reread and reinterpret rights and wrongs, faith and ethics. These are poems that help us grow regardless of our brand of faith or doubt.

4. Circus Poems, by Alex Grant (Lorimer Press, 2010). I just love the juxtaposition of found text and poems in this disturbing collection. A mesmerizing read and an integrated collection.

5. Lorine Neidecker: Collected Works (University of California Press, 2002). I am giving away a copy of her collected works (and a copy of my own Mercy Island http://www.phoeniciapublishing.com/mercy-island.html

) in a drawing this month as part of Kelli Russell Agodon's Big Poetry Giveaway http://ofkells.blogspot.com/2011/04/no-foolin-free-poetry-books-for.html

. Stop by my blog http://tribeofmadorphans.blogspot.com/2011/03/poetry-book-giveaway-book-of-kells.html

and sign up and then hit the other participant's blogs.



Ren Powell is an American poet, translator and teacher living in Norway. Her webpage is renpowell.com

Day 24: Dan O'Brien's Favorite Poetry Books

I always find it interesting to meet a writer who crosses genres. Dan is one such writer. Today, he shares his favorite poetry books.

Keith Waldrop:The Silhouette of the Bridge. Waldrop's Transcendental Studies won the 2009 National Book Award for poetry, but I have a special place in my heart for this earlier volume. When I was studying playwriting at Brown in the late '90s, I lived in his house while he and his wife, the remarkable poet Rosemarie Waldrop, were on sabbatical in Paris. Their printing presses (two!) were in the basement (still are?), and every bit of wall space was and still is, I'm sure, populated with a stupefying array of rare and wonderful books. My bedroom was Keith's study, which is where he keeps his books on religion, mysticism, the occult. The Silhouette of the Bridge in particular evokes Providence for me, with a certain haunted, humorous, keen intelligence that is both Providence and Keith Waldrop to me. (Maybe Waldrop is Providence?)

Anne Sexton: To Bedlam and Part Way Back. Like many people I read this book as a revelation. And also like many young people Sexton was the reason I began to write poetry at all. I stumbled upon it on a low shelf in my school library. I was shocked that someone was courageous enough – perhaps crazy enough — to write so honestly of secrets I recognized from my own young life, my own family, and I knew immediately what poetry was for.

Seamus Heaney: The Spirit Level. Death of a Naturalist, a model "first book" in my opinion, could easily be my pick instead. The final poem in The Spirit Level, entitled "Postscript," is almost shockingly beautiful every time I read it: "And some time make the time to drive out west…" I'm heading to the west of Ireland in a few weeks, as a matter of fact, in pursuit of that poem in many ways.

Jorge Luis Borges: Selected Poems. World famous for his short fiction, Borges's poetry has always been quietly, deeply moving to me — humorous, meditative, forgiving and sad. He helps me make peace with myself when I can't seem to get out of my own head.

WB Yeats: Collected Poems. I don't know if my poetic style, such as it is, will every recover from reading too much Yeats as a young man. My love for my wife, and my love of Ireland, both sustaining romances, are forever bound up in his work. He's the reason I went to live in Ireland in the '90s. I remember climbing Thoor Ballylee (or "Ballyphallus," as Pound preferred it), Yeats' tower in Gort, and striking my forehead on the low stone lintel before spinning out dazed onto the roof and feeling quite lucky to be alive, humbled and in awe of the beauty around me — all emotions I have when I read these poems.

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Dan O'Brien's play The Cherry Sisters Revisited has just been published by Playscripts. He is currently a fellow at the Rockefeller Foundation Bellagio Center in Bellagio, Italy, and will serve on the playwriting faculty this summer at the Sewanee Writers' Conference. His poetry has appeared recently in 32 Poems, Linebreak, storySouth, and elsewhere.